Former Trump surgeon general sounds alarm on president’s actions amid disease outbreaks

31 January

Dr. Jerome Adams, the Surgeon General during President Donald Trump’s first administration, is sounding the alarm on his former boss’s actions and disease outbreaks in the U.S. and around the world.

Adams, now a Purdue University professor and the Executive Director of the Center for Community Health Enhancement and Learning, pointed to news reports on the rapidly spreading bird flu, which has killed at least one person in the U.S., a tuberculosis outbreak in Kansas, and an Ebola outbreak in Uganda.

“Bird flu spreading like crazy in US, and now in UK,” he wrote on Friday. “Largest tuberculosis outbreak in decades… IN KANSAS! Ebola in Uganda.”

He then blasted President Donald Trump’s decision to temporarily suspend all external communications from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including warnings and advisories—a block that has no stated end date—and immediately sever all ties with the World Health Organization.

“Regardless of how you feel about ‘public health,’ or ‘Fauci,’ it’s a real bad time to have blocked public communications from CDC, and work with WHO…” he added.

Back in November, after Trump made highly controversial nominations for U.S. public health roles, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services, Dr. Adams issued a warning.

“Republicans must understand,” he said, that “they’re gonna own any and all preventable outbreaks / harm moving forward.”

According to Scientific American, “Bird flu continues to spread among commercial and backyard poultry. As of January 23, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that there were 98 infected flocks within the past 30 days, with more than 15 million birds affected. Avian influenza is so contagious and deadly in poultry that the entire flock is culled as soon as the presence of the virus is confirmed. Since the bird flu outbreak began in February 2022, more than 140 million birds have been infected or proactively culled.”

A USDA map shows bird flu has been detected in mammals in nearly every state in the country. The University of Minnesota reports bird flu outbreaks “in poultry in 11 states,” and in “cows in California.”

“In events that could worsen egg shortages, more [egg] layer farm outbreaks were reported in Indiana, Missouri, Ohio, and Washington state, totaling at least 1.5 million birds. The virus also struck turkey farms in Minnesota and Ohio, as well as broiler farms in Arkansas and Missouri,” the University’s Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy also reported. “The virus also turned up in backyard flocks in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, and California.”

The Kansas tuberculosis outbreak, according to the CDC, is one of the largest in U.S. history, the Associated Press reported.

Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an instructor at Harvard Medical School, on his Substack declared Friday as “day 11 of President Trump’s full-throttle attack on the US public health.” He added that this is the “second week of government censorship” for the CDC’s medical journals.

“Included in the censored studies are manuscripts that ‘reveal whether veterinarians who treat cattle have been unknowingly infected by the bird flu virus. Another report documents cases in which people carrying the virus might have infected their pet cats.’ These have the potential to be highly important reports,” Dr. Faust wrote. “Keeping them from the public eye is unethical, to say nothing of the nauseating policy that the Trump Administration has pursued: a gag order on public health publications ‘until it has been reviewed and approved by a presidential appointee.’ I can’t believe I just wrote that sentence from the United States of America.”

He added: “Last week President Trump not only announced that the US would withdraw from the WHO, but also directed an immediate stop-work order, and a halt to all foreign aid and related communications. This means that CDC and other US officials cannot help Uganda respond to an Ebola outbreak that was reported today. The WHO has committed $1 million in aid already.”

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